This was a very enjoyable trek into Alaska where I was able to learn a great deal about the land and the people. Remarkable (in a sad way) how contemporary some of the comments from the residents sound today, 40+ years after the book was written. McPhee is a prolific author. I'm not sure how I've missed him all these years. But, if the rest of his books are anywhere close to being as enjoyable as this one, I have lots of reading to do.

Very sorry to say this book, McPhee’s biggest* single work, never charmed me the same way his shorter ones did. There are certainly no flaws in the writing, which is as snappy and precise as a tape measure:

I once saw a Japanese climber in Richard and Dorothy Jones’s store there, buying a cabbage. It was a purple cabbage and somewhat larger than his own head, which was purple as well, in places, from contusions and sunburn, and probably windburn, suffered in his bout with the mountain. On his cheek was a welted wound, like a split in a tomato. Leaving the store, he walked out of town, ate his cabbage, and slept it off in a tent.

Structurally, the book is very similar to his earlier work The Pine Barrens - cover the landscape, then the people, then the history. The parts link together well, though I can see what people mean when they describe this as three books in one.

(*Annals of the Former World, while larger, reprints four previous books in one volume.)

"As bush communities in Alaska go, Eagle is a trig town. It has reputation for grace and beauty. This is not always evident to the eye of the outsider, which tends to alight on yards full of old tyres, fencing, caribou racks, dogsleds, snowshoes, lynx pelts, pole wood, fiftyfive-gallon drums, cans, kayak frames, kerosine heaters, cast-iron grain mills, tarpaper, fuel cans, six-cell batteries, corrugated roofing material, and rotting fish compost in open pits. The inhabitants have the aesthetic disadvantage of being human beings. Where people exist, things are gross. In Short Hill, New Jersey, and Greenwich, Connecticut, the lovely creatures on the combed lawns are spared their own grossness because they pay not to see it, they do not picnic at the town dump. There are community dumps in Alaska, too, but much of what might go there lingers in the yard because one day it could be needed."

I discovered this book because it was mentioned (possibly quoted--I can't be arsed to check) in Zinsser's On Writing Well and decided to check it out on a whim. I've never been interested in Alaska in my life, much less acquainted with it outside of a reading of Into the Wild. I will not claim to be significantly versed in any facet of Alaska, as big as it is, after reading this book. I still feel that I am better for reading it, and I consider the time it took to read this book (which is not terribly long) to be time invested wisely.

This book is about Alaska, at least circa 1976. Back then Alaska could boast a population of 400 thousand, of which 60 thousand were Native Americans. (As of 2011, Alaska's population had risen to 722,718.) Both then and now Anchorage boasted half the population. At the time Alaska became a state in 1959, the inhabitants hoped that would give them more control over their destiny--as McPhee explained, at the time only half of one percent of Alaska was in private hands--the rest was under federal control. After statehood, about ten percent of the land was bestowed on Indians by the Native Claims Settlement Act, and most of the rest designated to become national parks. As for what was left over, Alaska became a land caught between "the Sierra Club syndrome and the Dallas scenario." McPhee had a way of showing the tension between two ideals--development versus preserving wilderness.

McPhee does this primarily by treating you to a guided tour of the quirky inhabitants both human and wild (not that there seems much distinction between the two much of the time.) People in the bush, particularly in Upper Yukon, refer to their part of Alaska as "the country." Strangers appearing are "said to have come into the country." And few Alaskans he tells us about are natives, but once were those strangers. The title essay takes up well over half of the book and focuses on the people of the Upper Yukon and especially those around Eagle Town (largely white) and Eagle Village (largely Native American.) Most of the people he features are trappers or miners. And surrounding them are salmon, grayling, grizzly, moose--and what a friend of mine once told me is the Alaskan state bird--the mosquito. (McPhee tells how one time he slapped his leg and counted 17 dead mosquitoes on his palm).

In an interview of Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, he said that John McPhee is "a god... he's a master of that detail... of explaining how things worked... of making the world an interesting place." Coming from one of my favorite authors, that was high-praise--as it turns out deserved. What I noted right away is that McPhee has style. It may not be to everyone's liking, but it's there. There's a rhythm to his prose, a way of writing shapely phrases, and a lyricism probably helped along by two-thirds of this book being written first person, present tense. He often bounces between stories and personalities in a very meandering way. There are at times these free-floating quotations, like a chorus, giving you different sides. So this above all is literary journalism. It's also good journalism. Not only in the sense that it's lively and informative, but even though McPhee makes no bones about having his own opinion: he's also fair. Other views get to be aired too. Sometimes eccentric, very idiosyncratic views, but not ones simply straw-men chosen to show up the ridiculousness of the disfavored side.

The book writes of a way of life more exotic to me, a Native New Yorker, than Beijing or Johannesburg. I find the lifestyle described more horrific than idyllic to be honest, not being one to rhapsodize nature--but it certainly was fascinating to read about in McPhee's hands. Even though this book is already decades old, I left feeling it I much better understood the state that's America's last frontier.

Alaska book #3: McPhee is writing in the late 1970s, and he chronicles Alaska in three parts--a river, a search for a new capital, and a town (Eagle). He digs deeply into the land issues that exist between federal government (Bureau of Land Management), the Native Claims Settlement Act (indigenous people groups), and locals/explorers. He gives wonderful character sketches of lives being lived in the wilderness, from miners to trappers to homesteaders. He encounters wildlife, specifically the grizzly bear, and writes perfect sentence after perfect sentence. Such an alive book.

A classic combination of sociology, history, geology and anthropology. McPhee dissects with a fine hand the recent history of Alaska since its purchase from Russia in 1867, using research and personal experiences to weave a compelling story. I particularly enjoyed Part 3 which deals mainly with the residents of Eagle, AK, population about 100 and sometimes less! The individual histories of the men and women of this town are combined in such a way as to give you a wonderful perspective on what drives people to endure the harsh terrain and climate of our biggest state. McPhee also tells us what Alaskans think of the Federal Government and their recent efforts to interfere with the lives of the residents.
How little I knew of this mysterious and beautiful place before reading this book! Since I combined it with a trip to Alaska, although not to Eagle, it had more force for me. Although it is over 40 years old , the book is still very relevant. A total delight!!

Traveling with John McPhee is always a treat, but this book is particularly dear to my heart because McPhee tries to capture a spirit and a mindset he thinks is quintessentially Alaskan. Can't fault him for that: he's from New Jersey. What he really captures is the Alaskan version of a mindset that is quintessentially Western and, because he's the kind of researcher who doesn't turn over stones without also tasting the bugs beneath, he does a gorgeously thorough, imminently readable job of it.

I'd easily put this in my top ten books ever read category, right up there alongside another McPhee book, Annals of the Former World.
This book is written for folks like myself, that are obsessed with the ideal of living in Alaska, of getting away from it all, of the dream of escaping from a corrupt country, into a country that while in America, is definitely not of America. McPhee has some of the most wonderful prose I have ever read, and he tackles with it the three frontiers, all wild to different degrees: the political, the conservational, and the individual. The individual frontier being the most fascinating of all as he paints a living picture of the type of men that "don't fit in".

It took me a long time to really get rolling with this book for some reason, but once I got to the personal stories and narratives surrounding the impacts of TAPS and ANCSA on land rights in Alaska, I binged the last third of the book in a day. It's amazing that this book was published 40 years ago, but the issues it delves into are still at the forefront today. The writing can feel a little dense at times, but ultimately it's a compelling read that I would recommend to anyone interested in how the state came to be.

I was hoping for a more balance discussion of the different areas and types of people in Alaska. Instead it started out primarily about his time in the uninhabited region north of the Yukon, and the entire second half of the book is about his time in Eagle - a VERY small town in eastern Alaska. Only one section or three brings up the people south of Fairbanks - Anchorage, Juneau, and the rest.

So ok I can’t blame him for his choice of topics. But then even within his topics his discussion and writing are wanting. He goes into incredible detail about individual people’s lives in Eagle - some interesting and some not. It gets old and boring. His main point is that Alaska is different from the rest of the US and the same laws can’t and shouldn’t apply. In Eagle people want to build their own cabins wherever they want.

Uhh… the population of Eagle is tiny. The state cannot be regulated based on the desires of a small number of citizens in one of its smallest towns. When the population grows above 200, it is no longer possible for each person to build anywhere he wants - that wouldn’t be workable. Yet this obvious point goes unmentioned. The fact that there are many more people in anchorage and Juneau and the desires of those people also goes unmentioned.

Overall very disappointing book.

I know this is practically sacrilegious, but this was my second favorite book I read before I traveled to Alaska in the early 80s. My favorite book was Going to Extremes by Joe McGinniss.